DISHONOR POINTS
Even among enemies as bitter as the Horde and Alliance, there is honor. If you flaunt this honor and engage in objectionable PvP play, such as killing new players vastly inferior to you in level, or killing essential non-combat NPCs such as flight masters or quest givers, you will earn dishonor. If you accumulate enough dishonor through your criminal actions, you will be branded an outlaw. As a consequence, you'll suffer experience penalties, lose access to your own faction cities, and become so hated by even your own kind that every faction NPC will attack you on sight.
--World of Warcraft Manual

Civilian NPCs were added later to discourage griefing.

if i remember correctly the part about becoming hated by our faction was scraped nearly immediately and never passed the alpha, dishonor make it to live but was disabled shortly after a massive qq storm of peoples crying about how it ruined world pvp (sound familiar no?)

How about we let the parenting of kids to... their parents? No, seriously, World of Warcraft is a videogame. Gaming it's supposed to be a fun activity (if you have that fun through challenges, social interactions, etc is completely up to you). Not some kind of "School of Hard Knocks about the Real World".

Love all the people saying ganking lowbies is just 'part of' pvp servers. I highly doubt that Blizzard was sitting around in a meeting and someone said, "Hey guys! Let's intentionally make a rule where you can be repeatedly killed and kept from playing our game by other players and there's NOTHING you can do about it! That sounds like fun!". No, that's not how things were intended, pvp servers are for people who want to enjoy pvp in the world, either between leveling characters, or max levels doing dailies, not genocide against the helpless. The lowbie-ganking parasites will continue to make their home there regardless however, and will do their best to justify their sad existence.

But it is how it was intended.

They allow a lot of freedom over people's ability to PVP on those servers, with only a few limitations on what areas you can't do it in. Things like the level of players involved doesn't factor into it. The game wasn't designed to encourage or reward people for that kind of shitty, pointless behavior, but it WAS designed with the freedom to do certain things in mind. And as we all know, if dickless people have the opportunity to be a piece of trash, they will always take it. If it was genuinely unintended blizzard could've done a hundred things to stop it over the almost 10 years now that it's been going on, but instead their official response has always been "its a pvp server, you knew what you were getting into".

I like ponies and I really don't care what you have to say about that.

They allow a lot of freedom over people's ability to PVP on those servers, with only a few limitations on what areas you can't do it in. Things like the level of players involved doesn't factor into it. The game wasn't designed to encourage or reward people for that kind of shitty, pointless behavior, but it WAS designed with the freedom to do certain things in mind. And as we all know, if dickless people have the opportunity to be a piece of trash, they will always take it. If it was genuinely unintended blizzard could've done a hundred things to stop it over the almost 10 years now that it's been going on, but instead their official response has always been "its a pvp server, you knew what you were getting into".

I find it amusing how people who gank lowbies are considered "trash" yet here you are insulting them.